


sorry I set your suit on fire (prompt ficlets)

by Catznetsov



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Farm/Ranch, Alternate Universe - Historical, Ficlet Collection, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-05
Updated: 2018-11-04
Packaged: 2019-08-19 03:42:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16526621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catznetsov/pseuds/Catznetsov
Summary: Braden had needed help around the barn, and maybe a spare pair of hands steady enough with a saw and level to refit the joists down at the south end. He did not need whatever this is.Sometimes in the mornings when Braden passes the half-cracked door he sees him still sleeping, bare feet slipping off the end, broad curve of his back. Sometimes he sees him standing, matching up shirt buttons, and sometimes the sound of his footsteps in the hall outside brings Tom’s eyes to his. Sometimes it’s the only time Tom looks at him straight all day.





	sorry I set your suit on fire (prompt ficlets)

 

Braden had needed help around the barn, and maybe a spare pair of hands steady enough with a saw and level to refit the joists down at the south end. He did not need whatever this is.

“I’m sorry,” Tom says, time and again. “I let the fire go out; let the dogs out; spilled the feed, your tea, burned the laundry. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.” And he doesn’t, mostly, do whatever it was again. But he fills the dry farmhouse up with little mistakes and things done different, and Braden resents the bubbling realization this is what it’s like to be _kept company._ He has dogs for that. 

The dogs are warm unwanted weight across his feet when he settles in the sitting room in the evenings. He wants to keep moving, but there’s little enough to do when the light has gone, and after a long day out his legs won’t keep on under him anyway. Tom keeps going, no sign of trouble. Braden watches his long legs up the path and the porch steps ahead of him on their way in from milking, any sign of the shakes or ache in his own hips and thighs. But Tom keeps on, into the kitchen, and Braden has to sit and listen to whatever he’s getting up to in the other room with nothing in his hands.

Tom comes back with tea. 

“I’m not that old,” Braden says, when he sets one mug just by his chair. Tom smiles down at the tabletop instead of him, and retreats without more. 

Tom is a warm unwanted weight running through his days, presence pinning Braden down as well as the dogs. He’s too big for the cab of the pickup, for the kitchen table, for the trestle bed Braden had promised in that help ad. He sleeps on it anyway. Sometimes in the mornings when Braden passes the half-cracked door he sees him still sleeping, bare feet slipping off the end, broad curve of his back. Sometimes he sees him standing, matching up shirt buttons, and sometimes the sound of his footsteps in the hall outside brings Tom’s eyes to his. Sometimes it’s the only time Tom looks at him straight all day. 

Without those times Braden could have gone until easily October without knowing his eyes are almost-green. In November he pads in and out and back into the sitting room and thumps down a full basket. He looks at it, and quick at Braden, and sits down to sew.

“You set your suit on fire now too?” Braden asks him. 

“Nah,” Tom says.

Braden sits with that. “I can fix that,” he says after a long while, but he wouldn’t have. It’s been as good an excuse as any not to go in to town on Sunday after Sunday. Tom bends to his work, fire shadows across his face.

If Tom’s own jacket’s not burned, he’s got no excuse for going around how he does in shirtsleeves, rolled up, even late into the fall. It takes Braden until he sees Tom’s knuckles streaked red, starting to crack in the cold, Tom hissing as he runs them under the tap on the way out the barn, to think he must not have a proper jumper in his trunk at all.

“Come on then,” Braden says, and doesn’t have to look to feel Tom follow, up the stairs to Braden’s bedroom, big in the door behind him. He finds a few of his grandfather’s folded away under his bed, sweet with cedar and maybe big enough. “You finish that suit coat yet?”

“Nah. I’m sorry,” Tom says. It’s clear he doesn’t even know why Braden’s asking that now, he just says so anyway.

“When you do you can take that then,” Braden says, glancing back and up at him. “For church, ’n all.” The trousers’ll hardly fit, but Tom’s own are alright and the sleeve’s are long enough around here. It’s not been hard to know Tom hasn’t been going either. 

Tom’s eyes are bright, watching him, his lip real pink, pulled between his teeth. He puts his hands in his pockets, takes them out again. “Yeah,” he says. “That’d be real nice, I guess.” 

That night Braden hears him saying prayer through the joining walls, and wonders, when he’s always saying sorry, what he thinks he needs forgiveness for now. 


End file.
